How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive

How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive PDF Note: Youll need Adobe Reader to view the PDF file above. Download Adobe Reader. Wednesday, September 18, 2013 Far too many employers are not aware that their Road Warriors are unhappy until its too late. Business travelers often focus on the downside of their role and many do not feel sufficiently valued by their employers. But we know Road Warriors are critical for the success of our businesses handholding clients, communicating delicate information and closing critical deals. In fact, experience has shown that Road Warriors are directly responsible for a growing percentage of business taking place today. Join Management consultant, futurist and USA TODAYs Road Warrior of the Year, Joyce Gioia as she discusses effective tactics for keeping your Road Warriors fully engaged and happy. There are no easy fixes. There are, however, proven strategies to convey your appreciation to your Road Warriors as well as help them stay connected with their office and family. Discover how to care for your most valuable employees during this fast-paced, interactive webinar. Presenter(s): Joyce Gioia President, The Herman Group Joyce Gioia is a Strategic Business Futurist concentrating on relationship aspects of the future. This arena includes workforce and workplace trends, as well as consumer, education, and business-to-business trends. Joyce is President of The Herman Group, a firm serving a wide range corporate, trade association and governmental clients on an international basis. Through consulting, speaking and training, Joyce helps clients position themselves for success in the future. Joyce has co-authored five books with her partner Roger Herman. These books are focused on what employers must do to attract, optimize, and hold onto their best employees. Joyce approaches Human Resources from an Internal Marketing perspective, taking external marketing concepts and strategies and applying them within the organization. She is a Founding Member of the Association of Professional Futurists as well as being an active Professional Member of the National Speakers Association and The World Future Society. Often quoted in the national media, like Industry Week, The Christian Science Monitor, Entrepreneur Magazine, Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio, Joyce is recognized as one who not only knows whats coming, but can communicate that future very effectively. She has also appeared on numerous radio and television talk shows and was featured in an episode of New Attitudes on the Lifetime Cable Network. Joyce is listed in Whos Who in America, Whos Who in the East, and the International Whos Who of Business Executives. Joyce was just named ROAD WARRIOR OF THE YEAR by USA TODAY. Webinar Transcript: How to Keep You Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive (18 Sept 13) Great. Thank you so much. Good afternoon everybody. Im Barrett Lad, an analyst here with Monster. Id like to thank you all for joining us today for this exclusive webinar hosted by Intelligence. Todays webinar is entitled How to Keep Your Road Warrior Employees Engaged and Productive. Joyce Gioia will be presenting this webinar. Throughout the webinar, thought leader Joyce Gioia will share insights for how to take care of your road warriors. Before we get started, Id like to mention a few housekeeping items. Todays presentation and a copy of the recording will be posted on hiring.monster.com within two to three business days. Please click on the Resources tab and navigate to HR events to obtain a copy. All registered participants will also receive an email with a direct link to todays materials. Let me tell you a little bit about Intelligence. We help HR professionals improve worker performance and to retain top talent and enhance recruiting strategies. We analyze and collect data from over four million unique searches performed on each day. We invite you to visit hiring.monster.com and read our in-depth reports and analyses. For our latest materials, click on the Resource Center tab when you visit the site. After Joyces presentation today, there will be time for questions, and our meeting manager Kim will help to facilitate the QA. Please feel free to type your questions in to the available space during the event, and well make every effort to include them in todays QA session. If youre listening to todays presentation via telephone, youll be placed on mute until the QA session begins. Id like to give some background on Joyce Gioia, todays speaker. Last April, USA Today changed our speakers life. They named Joyce their first road warrior of the year. Joyce was named their most valuable player for her insights in responsiveness. Joyce founded her first business at the age of 14, and at the age of 28, she became the countrys youngest national magazine publisher. A certified management consultant and certified speaking professional, Joyce has informed and entertained audiences on six continents and in 46 states. An accomplished journalist, Joyce has written hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines and websites. She serves as contributing editor to the future, as well as hotel executive magazines. Over 29,000 people in 87 countries read her Herman Trend Alert in four languages every week. Joyce is frequently quoted in the national media and has written many books. Last year she stayed in hotels for over 75 nights and flew an impressive 145,000 miles. Join me in w elcoming road warrior Joyce Gioia, whose topic today is Taking Care of your Road Warriors. Joyce, I will now turn the webinar over to you. Thanks so much, Barrett. Welcome, everyone. Its great to be with you today. When I was thinking about the fact that I was going to be spending this hour with you all, I was thinking back to when I was first a road warrior back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was when I was the publisher of a magazine called The Complete Buyers Guide to Stereo/Hi-Fi Equipment. It was wonderful being one of the only women in the consumer electronics industry. Im sure you can relate. Everything was going really well in my business life. Unfortunately, my personal life wasnt doing so well. I was stressed and struggling with the fact that my marriage was falling apart. Unfortunately, I was working with a small organization. They really didnt understand. That stress certainly affected my productivity. It certainly affected my engagement, and I was thinking about what they could have done to make my life different. There were a lot of things that they could have done. Some of them, Im going to be sharing with you today. The first thing Id like to address is who your road warriors are. In some cases, they are salesmen. Maybe they are frontline salesmen or your national sales managers. They could be representing particular industry segments or perhaps certain geographical areas in the country. Your road warriors might be responsible for clinical trials. As Ive travelled on airplanes, I have met a lot of people who are responsible for pharmaceutical companies clinical trials. They could be purchasing folks who are responsi ble for helping you get the best prices and the best delivery possible, so that you can drive the most profit to your bottom line. No matter what they do, warriors are your representatives out there in the big world. They are the folks who are responsible for connecting with clients, suppliers, and in some cases, investors. They can make a huge difference in how well your whole organization operates. Take care of them and youll see. So no matter what function they perform, they are important. Lets start by doing our first polling question. My first question to you is do you have a program or at least a list of road warrior friendly policies that you follow? Yes, no, or you dont know? Please answer now. We will record your answers Most organizations realize that their road warriors are important, but they dont really understand exactly what they need to do to make sure that their road warriors are functioning at optimum levels. Its not surprising that 40 percent of folks know that they do not have road warrior policies, and theres no formalized program. This does not surprise me. Im wondering whether, perhaps even as a result of having attended this webinar today, you will choose to create that list for your organization. One of the things I do, as a consultant, is help organizations to engage and retain their people. What does it take to engage a road warrior? It takes thinking about things from their point of view, certainly. I was wondering, how do you know if your road warrior is unhappy? Well, one of the ways is that he barks at you when you ask a question, or she is reluctant to accept another assignment. He seems exhausted and burned out. You might detect a little edge in his or her voice that wasnt the re before. Theres a difference when road warriors are unhappy, and you need to pay attention to that, because you could wait for your road warrior to quit, or you could be proactive. In this webinar, Im going to talk about low- and no-cost steps that you can take to help engage and retain your road warriors to make them more productive, reduce their stress, and make their lives somewhat easier. One step that you can take is to allow your travelers to take talk time when they need it. Talk to them. Find out whats going on in their lives. Do their children have some special play, some special teachers conference, or something that they might want to be there for? Youll never know if you dont ask them. Its the kind of thing that youll definitely want to communicate about with your road warriors. The second thing is that you want to encourage them to travel so that they arrive at their destination in the late afternoon, early evening, or maybe even earlier if they need to get set up or get certain details of a meeting. It just gives them the opportunity to have that extra reserve and encourage them to have it. As a road warrior, I find that its best when I can arrive at my destination by at least 4 oclock in the afternoon or a little bit earlier, or if I have to push it, 7 oclock at the latest. Then I get a good nights sleep, I dont have to eat dinner too late, and then Im much more fresh and feel much better about handling whatever it is I need to do the next day. You could also permit people to depart early enough on Friday morning, or whatever morning theyre leaving, in order to be home for dinner with their family or with their significant other. It makes a real difference when people feel supported. Allowing people to get home on a Friday night to have that dinner with the family really can make a substantial difference. You also want to make sure that you stay connected with them through technology, whether you use FaceTime, Skype, or just some other chatting program. You want to keep connected with your road warriors, because that will give you an opportunity to understand how theyre doing, whether they are engaged, and whether they are in any way stressing out. Lets talk about what else you could do. These are somewhat more extraordinary steps that you could take. Theyll cost you a little bit, but relatively speaking they wont cost a whole lot. See what you could do to arrange to allow them to stay over a day or even a weekend to see th e area. I was just in Massachusetts in Boston suburbs for about five weeks. I was there because my eldest daughter gave birth to my fourth grandson, and it was a very happy, happy time. There was a time during those five weeks, however, when my husband came to visit. I suggested to my daughter that given the number of family members, it might make a lot of sense for us to stay at a hotel nearby instead of staying at the house, which is where I had been. My husband doesnt particularly relish sleeping on a blow-up bed on the floor. I dont mind it, but hes not up for it a whole lot. We ended up staying at a local Residence Inn, and this local Residence Inn, as it happens, caters to road warriors. I was so impressed by what this hotel was doing. They take a special interest in the road warriors who come to visit this particular hotel. They find out a little bit about them, and then they give them special things that those particular people each care about. I mean, I was just very impressed when their general manager, whose name was Jennifer Hogan, was telling me what they do. You might want to see if you can talk to a hotelier and come up with some ways of showing your appreciation through little thoughtful gifts for your road warriors. It might be something that they can use for travel. It might be something that will make their lives more convenient, and it could even be the TripIt Pro app. It might be something to make their lives a little bit easier. What this does is it demonstrates that you really care about them. Now, what Jennifer did for me just absolutely blew me away. She looked online, and she found the article that had been written about me in USA Today, and then she picked all of my favorite things. I travel with dried mango strips and other dried fruit. I prefer KIND bars. I only drink sparkling water, and one of my favorites is San Pellegrino. She prepared a goodie bag of all of my favorite things. If you know what your road warrior is like, then you could do that as well, and have that waiting for them the next time they come into the office. You could also suggest that they take along the family or a significant other. Sometimes that brings a whole new dimension for people when they can take along their family. We road warriors spend a lot of time away from our families, and when we can take along our family, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, or our spouse, it does make a difference. The final thing is to send a surprise to the next hotel. If you have a road warrior who is going to be going to one hotel after another for you, you might want to surprise them by sending a small box of chocolate-covered strawberries from Edible Arrangements. I was very pleased when after the birth of her son, someone sent my daughter a beautiful Edible Arrangement made of melon, strawberries, and blueberries. It was just a lot of sun, very good, and very healthy. Many times when were on the road, we just dont eat as healthy as we could. Another thing that you might want to do for your road warriors is to help them with their nutrition on the road. As a small example, one of the things that I do when Im on the road is to have soup for dinner at the end of the day. That soup is a comfort food, and it makes me feel relaxed and de-stressed after a long day. It also helps to rehydrate my body. In fact, Ive actually written one of my road warrior tips about making mine soup. Lets do anoth er poll question. How well do you think youre doing in taking care of your road warriors? Were fantastic, were very good but theres definitely room for improvement, were okay but I know there are many things that we could do better, or we send them out on the road and hope for the best? This is somewhat related to what we did before in terms of whether you have a program. My suspicion is that many of you are okay in terms of taking care of your road warriors, and that there are a lot of things that you could be doing differently. In fact, Im going to have a whole section on my website on what employers can be doing to take better care of their employees who are road warriors. Im going to be blogging about it, and I also write articles about it, which are placed in various publications. We have a list of those in the media room and listed on the website as well. You might want to take a look at that for yourself. We have the poll question up. Do we have the poll question up, or do we not? There we go. Here is the poll question. How well do you think youre taking care of your road warriors? Because I talk with a lot of road warriors when Im on the road, its very unusual to find ones who feels like they are really being taken care of by employers. More often than not, they feel like its just a part. It comes with the territory. They feel like they absolutely have to do it, but they dont really love to do it. I may be unusual, but I really enjoy being on the road. I enjoy being on the road because I take it as a couple of opportunities. I take it as the opportunity to see how many peoples lives I can affect in a positive way. It might be by bringing a smile to someones face, by entertaining a child when a stressed-out parent doesnt know what he or she is going to do next. Im making faces, playing peek-a-boo with the children, or talking with someone who seems to be particularly sad. Ive met a number of people who were on their way home or going to funerals of friends and relatives, and I take it as my personal mission in life to see how I can bring joy into the lives of o thers. It will not surprise you to know that that makes a tremendous difference in my life, because their appreciation is then reflected back on me. Im not saying that everybody should raid the airline club and bring cookies, muffins, and whatever else to the flight attendants, like I do. Its something that I do that really makes me feel good, though. When Im on the road, I also take an opportunity to appreciate the local culture. Ill look at the local maps. I may not have time to go anywhere, but Ill interact with local people and learn what I can about the area. Im fascinated by people in other cultures, and I spend a lot of time on the road internationally as well. Im about to take my second trip to India, so I take those opportunities. Thank you for posting our poll results. As I expected, its really okay, but there are many things we could be doing. Great, thank you all for participating in our poll. The other thing that you could do is something that I urge all employers to do. There are a lot of organizations that spend a lot of money conducting exit interviews. The problem is that when theyre conducting the exit interviews, its too late. They cant do anything about it for that person, and that person may be a highly valued employee. I suggest that you conduct stay interviews, and the first thing you want to do is ask what they like best. You also want to ask what they like least. You want to find out, what are their dissatisfiers? What are the things theyre really unhappy about? What are the things that you could do something about? What are the things that you dont even know what to do something about and will need to ask around or even ask me what you might do about it. We have a tool on our website that I believe are free for download. If it costs anything, just send me an email to joyce@hermangroup.com, and I will send it to you for free. We have a whitepaper that talks about conducting stay and exit interviews, because we believe that stay interviews are very important. When you find out these dissatisfiers, then you can do something about it in a timely manner. One of the companies that I was privileged to work with along the way was a company that was written up in Ink magazine. In fact, there were six pages about this in Ink magazine. I helped this company to reduce their turnover from over 300 percent to under 25 percent in fewer than five months. The way that I did that was to have them establish a director of retention. This director of retentions job was to go and talk to the people and find out what are the dissatisfiers. What are they unhappy about? She had top secret clearance. She was not allowed to share any of that information about the individual, identifying it who said it, but she was definitely allowed to take care of whatever the issue was. One of the things we discovered was that the managers needed extra training, so we took care of those things. When you know what dissatisfiers are, you are able to address them in a timely manner, and you are not going to lose the person. Ask what more could you be doing for that person or if there is extra support that they need. In my case, when I was going through a divorce, if somebody had asked me, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said, I dont know. What I really needed, though, was not only help with time management, but also some counseling to get through it. Unfortunately, I got neither, and so my productivity really did suffer. You dont have to have the problems that my employer had, though. You can conduct stay interviews, which can be your early warning system. Take care of your road warriors, and they will take care of your customers. They will be more engaged, they will be more productive, and they will drive more to your bottom line. Carpe futurum. Seize the future. I know that weve been pretty short today, and Im wondering if perhaps we can use this opportunity to ask more questions. If you dont want to ask your question today, you can call me, and that is my direct cell number. I will not be on the road tomorrow, surprisingly. You can also ema il me at joyce@hermangroup.com. To sign up for my road warrior travel tips, visit www.roadwarriorinsights.com, and click on the travel tips box. It is absolutely free. Lets have some questions. How about it, Barrett? Great. Thank you so much, Joyce, for sharing your insight, knowledge, and some great ideas with everybody today. At this time Id like to turn the webinar over to our meeting manager, Kim, who will help support our question and answer session. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to register a question, please press one followed by four on your telephone. Youll hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge your request. Your line will then be accessed from the conference to obtain information. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press one followed by three. If youre using a speaker phone, please lift your handset before entering your request. One moment, please, for our first question. Okay. I have one question. The first is, how do I get my boss to understand the importance of taking care of my road warriors? Thats a great question. The way that you can do that is to help them to understand what losing that road warrior would cost. The Society for Human Resource Management talks about it costing up to three to five times the salary to replace a valued employee. When youre talking about road warriors who have those valuable relationships, its even more. When you can show your boss what its going to cost them, then they will hopefully see how investing a little bit in taking care of your road warriors can make a difference. Great. Thank you Joyce. One other question is, what is the difference between a stay interview and a review? Oh, theres a big difference. A review is to assess the performance of your employee. You are saying to them, I think you did this right, and there is room for improvement in this other area. Actually, Im glad you asked, because we have a particular way that we encourage employers to do those reviews. We encourage them to have the employee review himself, have the manager or supervisor review the employee, and then they get together to come up with what goes into the record. In that way, you can really avoid a lot of misunderstandings. I think it makes a profound difference in terms of the level of engagement and retention that youre going to get. A stay interview is something that you do proactively, kind of like taking the temperature of your employee. You know how you conduct surveys across your entire employee population? Well, this is kind of a one-on-one survey where youre finding out how that employee is doing and whether hes feeling good about working with you. A third question here is, what advice do you have for recruiting road warriors, as opposed to engaging them when youre going out and hiring new road warriors? You want to make sure that your road warriors understand what is involved in the job. If its someone who has never been a road warrior before, you really want to make sure that they understand whats going to be involved. Some people approach it with excitement and a positive attitude, but others, perhaps not. When youre talking about young people in particular, they think about travel as being very glamorous. They think about staying in hotels as being this wonderful thing where theyll get to see different areas. In many cases, they do get to see new cities. Unfortunately, too often, we road warriors see the insides of taxis, the insides of hotels, the insides of airports, and not a whole lot else. I would urge you to have your new road warriors do job shadowing with your more seasoned folks. The other thing that I would do, if I were you, is to make sure that the psychological profile matches up with your road warriors who are the most successful and the most happy on the road. Typically the happiest are the most successful. What I mean by that is that there are different assessments that you can look at, including my favorite. You can find People Clues at peopleclues.com. With an investment of 20 or 30 minutes, it can help you know whether this individual has the temperament to make it as a road warrior. What you what to do is to test your best people, or the folks who are doing really well on the road for you. Now that becomes your model and the profile that youre going after. When new people become candidates for you, youre going to compare their scores in the different categories with the scores that your best road warriors have. Then you will know. Youll have a very good barometer for whether this person is going to be successful as a road warrior. By the way, you m ight want to have them sign up for my road warrior tips, because that will help them to reduce their stress and be more productive on the road. Kim, at this point, are there any questions over the telephone? There are no questions at this time. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to register for a question over the phone lines, please press one, four on your telephone keypad. Okay, Ive a few more coming in online for you Joyce. Great. The next ones a great question. Do you have any cost effective ideas to show appreciation to our outside sales reps who do not work directly for the company? Thats so important. I have done two-day workshops on contingent workforce, helping to bond with and retain your contingent workforce. So many organizations dont understand that your contractors are really an extension of you. You need to address high turnover among that contract force, whether its road warriors, sales people, or internal people who make a tremendous difference in terms of continuity with your customers and your clients. Lets answer your question. You want to look at what has a high perceived value to these sales people and a low cost to you. Youll have to interview them to find out what magazines they read and whether there are particular apps that theyve found to be helpful to them. You want to poll them to see what works for them, and then you can use that for the other folks to kind of cross-pollinate with low- and no-cost ideas. What else could you do with your contract sales people? What is it that they value? Thats what you want to look at. What is it that they value thats in your control to give them? I would be very pleased to discuss this with you one-on-one offline if you would like to delve further into this question. As a side to that, what if the outside sales rep cant accept monetary gifts? How does that play out? Well, nothing that I was talking about was necessarily monetary. If you ask them, obviously they might say, Yes, Id love to have a bonus. I have maintained that if you think about and work with what is most valuable to whatever audience it is and come up with ideas that are valuable to them, whether its information or time. Maybe youre not allowed to give them monetary things, but are you allowed to have a party for them? Are you allowed to send things to them on the road? Are you allowed to give them, for instance, an overnight bag that has their name on it? Theres different things that you could do that would be helpful. Let me just share with you that when I was looking for a gift that I could give as a speaker, I had a $25 max that I knew I wanted to spend on my gifts for the folks who hired me. I talked to the premium folks, I looked online, and I did a lot of research. I came up with something thats not as good for your contract sales people who are on airplanes, but would be a great gift for your contract sales people who are just in cars. That is a Swiss Card, which is the equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife in the form of a credit card. I put our name, our telephone number, and our website on it. It was very much appreciated by a lot of people when we gave it out. At that time, knives were not prohibited on airplanes. Im still getting up the courage to try to kick a Swiss card on an airplane, so that I can see if its going to work now. I know that some of the restrictions have been relaxed, and sometimes, especially for me because I have Precheck, it might be okay. Stay posted. Ill put that on my website when I find out whether it will work or not. Thats great. Thank you so much, Joyce. I think at this time were going to thank Joyce very much for sharing your expertise today, and this will conclude our webinar for today. A recording of this event, as well as the presentation materials, will be available shortly on our hiring site, hiring.monster.com under the Resource Center tab. Thanks again for joining us. Please join us again on October 2nd, when our webinar will be Stressed at Work: What We Can Learn from AAP Utilization. Thank you, and have a great day.